About "Pride and Prejudice"

Calling all Jane Austen fans – and everyone else who loves a sparkling comedy about the entanglements of family, love, marriage, and money. Following the runaway success of her adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, playwright Kate Hamill returns to the immortal English writer with a fresh take on Austen’s most famous novel. As the story of the Bennet daughters and their formidable social-ladder climbing mother unfolds, strong-willed Lizzie charts an independent course as she negotiates very mixed feelings about the aloof and seemingly snobbish Mr. Darcy. Hamill’s imaginative and irreverent version of this literary classic makes Austen’s deep insights into the foibles of human nature a theatrical treat you won’t forget.

​​It was 2010, and Kate Hamill, an aspiring actress, was frustrated by the dearth of good female roles in female-centric stories. She bet a friend a hundred dollars that she could create her own “classic,” based on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. The show had a short stint Off Broadway in 2014, then returned last year for a hit encore run, at the Gym at Judson. Eric Tucker’s production was no staid costume drama but a hyper-caffeinated romp, with a chorus of nattering gossips and wheeled furniture that rarely stopped swirling.Hamill, thirty-four, has now found her niche in the theatre world, adapting thick nineteenth-century novels into kinetic stage concoctions—and starring in them. This spring, she hacked down Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” for the Pearl and took the role of its cunning antiheroine, Becky Sharp. Now she’s playing Elizabeth Bennet in her own screwball adaptation of Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” at the Cherry Lane. The second-youngest of six, Hamill had an Austen-like upbringing herself. She was raised in an eighteen-fifties farmhouse in Lansing, New York, a dairy-farming town so remote that when Hamill was little it didn’t have 911. Her parents, both grant writers, thought television rotted the brain, so she took up books instead, discovering “Pride and Prejudice” as a junior in high school.How to pare down such doorstoppers? Hamill starts with a central theme. With “Pride and Prejudice,” she said, the guiding question was “How do you know if you met ‘the one,’ in modern parlance? And, for me, I’ve been super-ambivalent about marriage and romantic love.” That attitude has evolved since she’s been in a long-term relationship, with the actor Jason O’Connell.Hamill and O’Connell first met at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, and, Hamill recounts, “I swear to God, a bell went off in my head. Like, ding! ” Bells are a recurring motif in her “Pride and Prejudice.” The couple lives in Forest Hills, and they are not yet betrothed. “In this play, he proposes to me, and I wrote the proposal,” Hamill said, her voice lowering to a hapless whisper. “This play should be subtitled, like, ‘My Very Public Marriage Journey.’ ” from The New Yorker, November 27, 2017

﻿﻿Hayden Theater is committed to the education of the whole person, an education that fosters emotional, social, and spiritual growth within the context of a Catholic culture through the theatrical expression of wisdom and truth, shaped by a communal spirit and directed toward the transcendent destiny of each student.﻿﻿